Latin American History and the Rise of a New Transcultural Identity

Felipe Guaman Poma's Nueva corónica y buen gobierno is a nearly unique text in colonial Spanish American letters. It is at once a personalized version of a history of the Inca empire and its civilization as well as an even longer account of Spanish colonialism in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Peru and long harangues against its injustices. There is no equivalent “exposé” written from an indigenous Andean perspective during the early colonial period.

Thematically, the literary and artistic work conceived by Guaman Poma was to be both historical and prescriptive: a new chronicle of ancient and modern events in the Andes and a treatise on “good government” that would combine Inca social and economic organization with European technical achievements and religious culture modified to meet Andean needs. With respect to the ancient past, his goal was to relate Andean history to universal Judeo-Christian history, postulating a series of historical ages to do so). With respect to the recent past, he focused on the history and achievements of Inca civilization. He called his book a “new” chronicle because he knowingly contradicted many established sources on matters of Inca and conquest political history in order to effectively put forward certain juridical arguments about the rights of native Andeans to hegemony over their own territories (Guamán Poma de Ayala, 11-19). He framed his outcry against injustice and his formal plans for viceregal reform on the basis of his concerns about the gradual extinction of the Andean race through miscegenation, abusive treatment by the colonists, disease (there had been great epidemics of measles and smallpox in the late 1570s and the second half of the 1580s), and the massive deportations of forced indigenous labor to the mercury and silver mines at Potosí and Huancavelica. In the subsequent stage of post-February 1615 revision Guaman Poma introduced for the first time his recommendation that native Andeans be admitted to religious orders, he reemphasized his condemnation of tributary Indians who became “false caciques,” thus presenting a view of an increasingly disintegrating Andean society, and he expressed utter despair at the increasing aggressiveness of ecclesiastical campaigns that attempted to root out native religion and resulted in the destruction of lives and the confiscation of properties.

Part II

The Spanish colonization of the Americas was the settlement and political rule over much of the western hemisphere which was initiated by the Spanish ...